The Sculptor's Funeral

A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little

Kansas town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already

twenty minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over everything; in

the pale starlight the line of bluffs across the wide, white meadows

south of the town made soft, smoke-colored curves against the clear sky.

The men on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other,

their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats

open, their shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from

time to time toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along

the river shore. They conversed in low tones and moved about restlessly,

seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them. There was but one of

the company who looked as though he knew exactly why he was there; and

he kept conspicuously apart; walking to the far end of the platform,

returning to the station door, then pacing up the track again, his chin

sunk in the high collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping

forward, his gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by a

tall, spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled

out from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning his

neck forward until his back made the angle of a jackknife three-quarters

open.

“I reckon she's agoin' to be pretty late ag'in tonight, Jim,” he

remarked in a squeaky falsetto. “S'pose it's the snow?”

“I don't know,” responded the other man with a shade of annoyance,

speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew

fiercely and thickly in all directions.

The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the other

side of his mouth. “It ain't likely that anybody from the East will come

with the corpse, I s'pose,” he went on reflectively.

“I don't know,” responded the other, more curtly than before.

“It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other. I like an

order funeral myself. They seem more appropriate for people of some

reputation,” the spare man continued, with an ingratiating concession

in his shrill voice, as he carefully placed his toothpick in his vest

pocket. He always carried the flag at the G. A. R. funerals in the town.

The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up the

siding. The spare man shuffled back to the uneasy group. “Jim's ez full

ez a tick, ez ushel,” he commented commiseratingly.

Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet

on the platform. A number of lanky boys of all ages appeared as suddenly

and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from the

waiting room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove,

or half-asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from

baggage trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from

the driver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding.

They straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and

a flash of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold,

vibrant scream, the world-wide call for men. It stirred them like the

note of a trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming

home tonight, in his boyhood.

The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh

lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of shivering

poplars that sentineled the meadows, the escaping steam hanging in gray

masses against the pale sky and blotting out the Milky Way. In a moment

the red glare from the headlight streamed up the snow-covered track

before the siding and glittered on the wet, black rails. The burly man

with the disheveled red beard walked swiftly up the platform toward

the approaching train, uncovering his head as he went. The group of

men behind him hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and

awkwardly followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd

shuffled up to the express car just as the door was thrown open,

the spare man in the G. A. B. suit thrusting his head forward with

curiosity. The express messenger appeared in the doorway, accompanied by

a young man in a long ulster and traveling cap.

“Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?” inquired the young man.

The group on the platform swayed and shuffled uneasily. Philip Phelps,

the banker, responded with dignity: “We have come to take charge of the

body. Mr. Merrick's father is very feeble and can't be about.”

“Send the agent out here,” growled the express messenger, “and tell the

operator to lend a hand.”

The coffin was got out of its rough box and down on the snowy platform.

The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed a

close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which lay

across the black cover. No one said anything. The baggage man stood by

his truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and

the fireman dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and

long oilcan, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of

the dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked about him

helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of that black,

uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of an individual to be

addressed.

“None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?” he asked uncertainly.

The man with the red heard for the first time stepped up and joined the

group. “No, they have not come yet; the family is scattered. The body

will be taken directly to the house.” He stooped and took hold of one of

the handles of the coffin.

“Take the long hill road up, Thompson--it will be easier on the horses,”

called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of the hearse

and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.

Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: “We didn't

know whether there would be anyone with him or not,” he explained. “It's

a long walk, so you'd better go up in the hack.” He pointed to a single,

battered conveyance, but the young man replied stiffly: “Thank you, but

I think I will go up with the hearse. If you don't object,” turning to

the undertaker, “I'll ride with you.”

They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight tip the

long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village were

shining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on every

side, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide as the

soft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence.

When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,

weatherbeaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that

had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front

yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the

sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung

on one hinge and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young

stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of the front

door.

The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse,

was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched

open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow

and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: “My boy, my boy! And this

is how you've come home to me!”

As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of

unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular,

dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs.

Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: “Come, come, Mother; you

mustn't go on like this!” Her tone changed to one of obsequious

solemnity as she turned to the banker: “The parlor is ready, Mr.

Phelps.”

The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the

undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large,

unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish,

and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass

prisms and before a “Rogers group” of John Alden and Priscilla,

wreathed with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening

conviction that there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had

somehow arrived at the wrong destination. He looked painfully about

over the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the

hand-painted china plaques and panels, and vases, for some mark of

identification, for something that might once conceivably have belonged

to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his friend in the

crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls hanging above the

piano that he felt willing to let any of these people approach the

coffin.

“Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face,” wailed

the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully,

almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses

of strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then,

almost incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about

her face--a kind of brutal handsomeness, even, but it was scarred and

furrowed by violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions

that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long

nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines

on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her

forehead; her teeth were large and square and set far apart--teeth that

could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed

about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being

drawn into the whirlpool.

The daughter--the tall, rawboned woman in crepe, with a mourning comb in

her hair which curiously lengthened her long face sat stiffly upon the

sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her

lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of the

coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in

the house, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and

gentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted

to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavens

walked over and stood beside her.

Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail,

odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept gray hair and a dingy beard,

tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up

to the coffin and stood, rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his

hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief

that he had no consciousness of anything else.

“There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so,” he quavered timidly,

putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned

with a cry and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he

tottered a little. He did not even glance toward the coffin, but

continued to look at her with a dull, frightened, appealing expression,

as a spaniel looks at the whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and

burned with miserable shame. When his wife rushed from the room her

daughter strode after her with set lips. The servant stole up to the

coffin, bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen,

leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and the father to themselves. The old man

stood trembling and looking down at his dead son's face. The sculptor's

splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid stillness than in

life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wide forehead; the face

seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that beautiful and chaste

repose which we expect to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were

so drawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the

chin was thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life

had been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once wholly relax

the tension and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he

were still guarding something precious and holy, which might even yet be

wrested from him.

The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to

the lawyer with timid deference: “Phelps and the rest are comin' back to

set up with Harve, ain't they?” he asked. “Thank 'ee, Jim, thank 'ee.”

He brushed the hair back gently from his son's forehead. “He was a good

boy, Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest

of 'em all--only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him.” The tears

trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.

“Martin, Martin. Oh, Martin! come here,” his wife wailed from the top of

the stairs. The old man started timorously: “Yes, Annie, I'm coming.” He

turned away, hesitated stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then

he reached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from

the room.

“Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his

eyes would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep,”

remarked the lawyer.

Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been

in the room the young man had scarcely seen anyone else; but now, from

the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and bloodshot

eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not

finding before--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in

someone, even here.

The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by

dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that of

a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept plucking

at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by

the window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling

pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked

behind him, staring down into the master's face. He could not help

wondering what link there could have been between the porcelain vessel

and so sooty a lump of potter's clay.

From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door

opened the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for

having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had

been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in

the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and

masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had

been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust the

lawyer went into the dining room and closed the door into the kitchen.

“Poor Roxy's getting it now,” he remarked when he came back. “The

Merricks took her out of the poorhouse years ago; and if her loyalty

would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would

curdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here a

while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there

never was anybody like her for demonstrative piety and ingenious

cruelty. She made Harvey's life a hell for him when he lived at home;

he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how he kept himself so

sweet.”

“He was wonderful,” said Steavens slowly, “wonderful; but until tonight

I have never known how wonderful.”

“That is the true and eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come

even from such a dung heap as this,” the lawyer cried, with a sweeping

gesture which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within

which they stood.

“I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close

I am beginning to feel rather faint,” murmured Steavens, struggling with

one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so

he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came

over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist, and sent the

window up a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had

been gradually climbing into his throat for the last half-hour left him

with but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this

place with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well

enough now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often

on his master's lips!

He remembered that once, when Merrick returned from a visit home, he

brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a

thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee;

while a full-lipped, full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up

by a single gallows, stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to

call her attention to a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by

the tender and delicate modeling of the thin, tired face, had asked him

if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush that had burned up

in the sculptor's face.

The lawyer was sitting in a rocking chair beside the coffin, his head

thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,

puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal

a feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard.

Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor's keen glance, he opened

his eyes.

“Was he always a good deal of an oyster?” he asked abruptly. “He was

terribly shy as a boy.”

“Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so,” rejoined Steavens.

“Although he could be very fond of people, he always gave one the

impression of being detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was

reflective, and rather distrustful of himself--except, of course, as

regarded his work. He was surefooted enough there. He distrusted men

pretty thoroughly and women even more, yet somehow without believing ill

of them. He was determined, indeed, to believe the best, but he seemed

afraid to investigate.”

“A burnt dog dreads the fire,” said the lawyer grimly, and closed his

eyes.

Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood.

All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose

tastes were refined beyond the limits of the reasonable--whose mind was

an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions, and so sensitive that

the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall would

be etched and held there forever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic

word in his fingertips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed

its holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored it to its

pristine loveliness, like the Arabian prince who fought the enchantress

spell for spell. Upon whatever he had come in contact with, he had left

a beautiful record of the experience--a sort of ethereal signature; a

scent, a sound, a color that was his own.

Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's life; neither

love nor wine, as many had conjectured, but a blow which had fallen

earlier and cut deeper than these could have done--a shame not his, and

yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very boyhood. And

without--the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a

desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened

and old, and noble with traditions.

At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black crepe entered, announced

that the watchers were arriving, and asked them “to step into the dining

room.” As Steavens rose the lawyer said dryly: “You go on--it'll be a

good experience for you, doubtless; as for me, I'm not equal to that

crowd tonight; I've had twenty years of them.”

As Steavens closed the door after him be glanced back at the lawyer,

sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his

hand.

The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express car

shuffled into the dining room. In the light of the kerosene lamp they

separated and became individuals. The minister, a pale, feeble-looking

man with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a

small side table and placed his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat

down behind the stove and tilted his chair back comfortably against the

wall, fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two

bankers, Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner table,

where they could finish their discussion of the new usury law and its

effect on chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man

with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal-and-lumber

dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard

coal-burner, their feet on the nickelwork. Steavens took a book from

his pocket and began to read. The talk around him ranged through various

topics of local interest while the house was quieting down. When it

was clear that the members of the family were in bed the Grand Army man

hitched his shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on

the rounds of his chair.

“S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?” he queried in his weak falsetto.

The banker laughed disagreeably and began trimming his nails with a

pearl-handled pocketknife.

“There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?” he queried in his

turn.

The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his

knees still nearer his chin. “Why, the ole man says Harve's done right

well lately,” he chirped.

The other banker spoke up. “I reckon he means by that Harve ain't asked

him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his

education.”

“Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve wasn't bein'

edycated,” tittered the Grand Army man.

There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief and

blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap.

“It's too bad the old man's sons didn't turn out better,” he remarked

with reflective authority. “They never hung together. He spent money

enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle farms and he might as well have

poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse

what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom

farm, they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust

everything to tenants and was cheated right and left.”

“Harve never could have handled stock none,” interposed the cattleman.

“He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought

Sander's mules for eight-year-olds, when everybody in town knew that

Sander's father-in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present

eighteen years before, an' they was full-grown mules then.”

Everyone chuckled, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees with a spasm

of childish delight.

“Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was

never fond of work,” began the coal-and-lumber dealer. “I mind the last

time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn

helpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was

patchin' up the fence, Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in

his ladylike voice: 'Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.'”

“That's Harve for you,” approved the Grand Army man gleefully. “I kin

hear him howlin' yet when he was a big feller in long pants and his

mother used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin' the

cows git foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin' 'em home from

pasture. He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onc't--a pure Jersey and the

best milker I had, an' the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was

watchin' the sun set acros't the marshes when the anamile got away; he

argued that sunset was oncommon fine.”

“Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to

school,” said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate,

judicial tone. “There was where he got his head full of traipsing to

Paris and all such folly. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course

in some first-class Kansas City business college.”

The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it possible that

these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing

to them? The very name of their town would have remained forever buried

in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world

in connection with Harvey Merrick's. He remembered what his master had

said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs

had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked

his pupil to send his body home. “It's not a pleasant place to be lying

while the world is moving and doing and bettering,” he had said with a

feeble smile, “but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the

place we came from in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look

at me; and after they have had their say I shan't have much to fear from

the judgment of God. The wings of the Victory, in there”--with a weak

gesture toward his studio--“will not shelter me.”

The cattleman took up the comment. “Forty's young for a Merrick to cash

in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along with

whisky.”

“His mother's people were not long-lived, and Harvey never had a robust

constitution,” said the minister mildly. He would have liked to say

more. He had been the boy's Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of

him; but he felt that he was not in a position to speak. His own sons

had turned out badly, and it was not a year since one of them had made

his last trip home in the express car, shot in a gambling house in the

Black Hills.

“Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently looked upon

the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommon

fool of him,” moralized the cattleman.

Just then the door leading into the parlor rattled loudly, and everyone

started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out.

His red face was convulsed with anger, and the Grand Army man ducked

his head when he saw the spark in his blue, bloodshot eye. They were all

afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he could twist the law to suit his

client's needs as no other man in all western Kansas could do; and

there were many who tried. The lawyer closed the door gently behind him,

leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking his head a little

to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the courtroom, ears were

always pricked up, as it usually foretold a flood of withering sarcasm.

“I've been with you gentlemen before,” he began in a dry, even tone,

“when you've sat by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town;

and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied when

you checked them up. What's the matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputable

young men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It might almost

seem to a stranger that there was some way something the matter with

your progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young lawyer

you ever turned out, after he had come home from the university as

straight as a die, take to drinking and forge a check and shoot himself?

Why did Bill Merrit's son die of the shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why

was Mr. Thomas's son, here, shot in a gambling house? Why did young

Adams burn his mill to beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?”

The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist

quietly on the table. “I'll tell you why. Because you drummed

nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they wore

knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as you've been carping

here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their

models, as our grandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams.

But the boys, worse luck, were young and raw at the business you put

them to; and how could they match coppers with such artists as Phelps

and Elder? You wanted them to be successful rascals; they were only

unsuccessful ones--that's all the difference. There was only one boy

ever raised in this borderland between ruffianism and civilization who

didn't come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out

than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels. Lord, Lord,

how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is fond of saying that he could buy

and sell us all out any time he's a mind to; but he knew Harve wouldn't

have given a tinker's damn for his bank and all his cattle farms put

together; and a lack of appreciation, that way, goes hard with Phelps.

“Old Nimrod, here, thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as

Nimrod and me!”

“Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's money--fell

short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the

very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in

the county court; and we all know that the old man came out of that

partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I'm

getting personal, and I'd better be driving ahead at what I want to

say.”

The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on:

“Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead

in earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We

meant to be great men. Even I, and I haven't lost my sense of humor,

gentlemen, I meant to be a great man. I came back here to practice, and

I found you didn't in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me

to be a shrewd lawyer--oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him

an increase of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new

county survey that would put the widow Wilson's little bottom farm

inside his south line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per cent a month

and get it collected; old Stark here wanted to wheedle old women up in

Vermont into investing their annuities in real estate mortgages that are

not worth the paper they are written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough,

and you'll go on needing me; and that's why I'm not afraid to plug the

truth home to you this once.

“Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me

to be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you'll

stand up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul you couldn't dirty

and whose hands you couldn't tie. Oh, you're a discriminating lot of

Christians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey's name in

some Eastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and,

again, times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away

from all this hog wallow, doing his great work and climbing the big,

clean upgrade he'd set for himself.

“And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and

hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little

Western town know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey

Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've

got put together, and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the

inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from

this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to

know that the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only

tribute any truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick,

side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers

of Sand City--upon which town may God have mercy!”

The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught up

his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand Army

man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck about

at his fellows.

Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services.

Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start East

without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from him

again, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found

it, he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had

loved must have gone underground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it

never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the

Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons, who had got into

trouble out there by cutting government timber.

“A Death in the Desert”

Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the

aisle was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a

conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged

him to be a traveling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an

adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool

and clean under almost any circumstances.

The “High Line Flyer,” as this train was derisively called among

railroad men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the

monotonous country between Holdridge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond

man and himself the only occupants of the car were two dusty,

bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the Exposition at Chicago,

and who were earnestly discussing the cost of their first trip out of

Colorado. The four uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment

of fine, yellow dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold

powder. It blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through

which they passed, until they were one color with the sagebrush and

sandhills. The gray-and-yellow desert was varied only by occasional

ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of station houses,

where the spindling trees and sickly vines in the bluegrass yards made

little green reserves fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.

As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through

the car windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies' permission to

remove his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirt sleeves, with a

black silk handkerchief tucked carefully about his collar. He had seemed

interested in Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdridge, and

kept glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of

the window, as though he were trying to recall something. But wherever

Everett went someone was almost sure to look at him with that curious

interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the

stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his

seat, half-closed his eyes, and began softly to whistle the “Spring

Song” from _Proserpine_, the cantata that a dozen years before had made

its young composer famous in a night. Everett had heard that air on

guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins at college glees, on cottage organs

in New England hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on

sleighbells at a variety theater in Denver. There was literally no way

of escaping his brother's precocity. Adriance could live on the other

side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in

his mature achievements, but his brother had never been able to outrun

_Proserpine_, and here he found it again in the Colorado sand hills. Not

that Everett was exactly ashamed of _Proserpine_; only a man of genius

could have written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius

outgrows as soon as he can.

Everett unbent a trifle and smiled at his neighbor across the aisle.

Immediately the large man rose and, coming over, dropped into the seat

facing Hilgarde, extending his card.

“Dusty ride, isn't it? I don't mind it myself; I'm used to it. Born and

bred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit. I've been trying to place you

for a long time; I think I must have met you before.”

“Thank you,” said Everett, taking the card; “my name is Hilgarde. You've

probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him.”

The traveling man brought his hand down upon his knee with such

vehemence that the solitaire blazed.

“So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance Hilgarde, you're

his double. I thought I couldn't be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess!

I never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played

the piano score of _Proserpine_ through to us once at the Chicago Press

Club. I used to be on the _Commercial_ there before I began

to travel for the publishing department of the concern. So you're

Hilgarde's brother, and here I've run into you at the jumping-off place.

Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn't it?”

The traveling man laughed and offered Everett a cigar, and plied him

with questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to

talk to Everett about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted

at a Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.

The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a matter of four

hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness

except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office

overtime on a summer night. When Everett alighted from the train he

walked down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as

to what direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near

the crossing, and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and

her figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was

too dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the

switch engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the

headlight threw a strong glare of light on his face. Suddenly the woman

in the phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started

forward and caught the horse's head, but the animal only lifted its

ears and whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly

still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed

to her face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the

phaeton, crying, “Katharine, dear, what is the matter?”

Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his

hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most

impossible places, especially by women, but this cry out of the night

had shaken him.

While Everett was breakfasting the next morning, the headwaiter leaned

over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him

in the parlor. Everett finished his coffee and went in the direction

indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His

whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique

was not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was

something below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His

thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show gray about the ears, and

his bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were

locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of

responsibilities; yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an

incongruous diffidence in his address.

“Good morning, Mr. Hilgarde,” he said, extending his hand; “I found your

name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I'm afraid my sister

startled you at the station last night, Mr. Hilgarde, and I've come

around to apologize.”

“Ah! The young lady in the phaeton? I'm sure I didn't know whether I

had anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe the

apology.”

The man colored a little under the dark brown of his face.

“Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see,

my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's, and it seems you favor

him; and when the switch engine threw a light on your face it startled

her.”

Everett wheeled about in his chair. “Oh! _Katharine_ Gaylord! Is it

possible! Now it's you who have given me a turn. Why, I used to know her

when I was a boy. What on earth--”

“Is she doing here?” said Gaylord, grimly filling out the pause. “You've

got at the heart of the matter. You knew my sister had been in bad

health for a long time?”

“No, I had never heard a word of that. The last I knew of her she was

singing in London. My brother and I correspond infrequently and seldom

get beyond family matters. I am deeply sorry to hear this. There are

more reasons why I am concerned than I can tell you.”

The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little.

“What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you. I

hate to ask you, but she's so set on it. We live several miles out of

town, but my rig's below, and I can take you out anytime you can go.”

“I can go now, and it will give me real pleasure to do so,” said

Everett, quickly. “I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment.”

When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley

Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and

settled back into his own element.

“You see, I think I'd better tell you something about my sister before

you see her, and I don't know just where to begin. She traveled

in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his

concerts; but I don't know just how much you know about her.”

“Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted

of his pupils, and that when I knew her she was very young and very

beautiful and turned my head sadly for a while.”

Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was quite engrossed by his grief. He was

wrought up to the point where his reserve and sense of proportion had

quite left him, and his trouble was the one vital thing in the world.

“That's the whole thing,” he went on, flicking his horses with the whip.

“She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a great

family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago,

and then to New York, and then to Europe, where she went up like

lightning, and got a taste for it all; and now she's dying here like a

rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can't fall back into ours.

We've grown apart, some way--miles and miles apart--and I'm afraid she's

fearfully unhappy.”

“It's a very tragic story that you are telling me, Gaylord,” said

Everett. They were well out into the country now, spinning along over

the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged-blue outline of the

mountains before them.

“Tragic!” cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, “my God, man, nobody

will ever know how tragic. It's a tragedy I live with and eat with and

sleep with, until I've lost my grip on everything. You see she had made

a good bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It's

her lungs, you know. I've got money enough to send her anywhere, but the

doctors all say it's no use. She hasn't the ghost of a chance. It's just

getting through the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before

she came to me. She just wrote that she was all run down. Now that she's

here, I think she'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won't

leave. She says it's easier to let go of life here, and that to go East

would be dying twice. There was a time when I was a brakeman with a run

out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little thing I could carry on my

shoulder, when I could get her everything on earth she wanted, and she

hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't cover; and now, when I've got a

little property together, I can't buy her a night's sleep!”

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status in the world

might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the ladder with him,

and the brakeman's frank avowal of sentiment. Presently Gaylord went on:

“You can understand how she has outgrown her family. We're all a pretty

common sort, railroaders from away back. My father was a conductor. He

died when we were kids. Maggie, my other sister, who lives with me, was

a telegraph operator here while I was getting my grip on things. We had

no education to speak of. I have to hire a stenographer because I can't

spell straight--the Almighty couldn't teach me to spell. The things that

make up life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there's scarcely a point

where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old times

when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in a church

choir in Bird City. But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that if she can see

just one person like you, who knows about the things and people she's

interested in, it will give her about the only comfort she can have

now.”

The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a

showily painted house with many gables and a round tower. “Here we are,”

he said, turning to Everett, “and I guess we understand each other.”

They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom Gaylord

introduced as “my sister, Maggie.” She asked her brother to show Mr.

Hilgarde into the music room, where Katharine wished to see him alone.

When Everett entered the music room he gave a little start of surprise,

feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some

New York studio that he had always known. He wondered which it was of

those countless studios, high up under the roofs, over banks and

shops and wholesale houses, that this room resembled, and he looked

incredulously out of the window at the gray plain that ended in the

great upheaval of the Rockies.

The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed him. Was it

a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it merely the studio

atmosphere that seemed so individual and poignantly reminiscent here

in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading chair and looked keenly about him.

Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the

piano. Then it all became clear to him: this was veritably his brother's

room. If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that

Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them

and leaving almost before the renovator's varnish had dried, it was at

least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance's taste was so manifest

that the room seemed to exhale his personality.

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord,

taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her

eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a

tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree

of embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first

youth, thoroughly sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of

what her brother had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank,

confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the

curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had

more good will than confidence toward the world, and the bravado of

her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest that was almost

discontent. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay

in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, lifegiving

quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a sort of perpetual

_salutat_ to the world. Her head, Everett remembered as peculiarly

well-shaped and proudly poised. There had been always a little of the

imperatrix about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old

impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly she

stood alone.

Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him

and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A very tall woman

advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak, she

coughed slightly; then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle

husky: “You see I make the traditional Camille entrance--with the cough.

How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde.”

Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not

looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming,

he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not

reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds

of her white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp

outlines of her emaciated body, but the stamp of her disease was

there; simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be

disguised or evaded. The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a

swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately

long, and her hands were transparently white and cold to the touch. The

changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head,

the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks,

all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key--older,

sadder, softer.

She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows.

“I know I'm not an inspiring object to look upon, but you must be quite

frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we've no

time to lose. And if I'm a trifle irritable you won't mind?--for I'm

more than usually nervous.”

“Don't bother with me this morning, if you are tired,” urged Everett. “I

can come quite as well tomorrow.”

“Gracious, no!” she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humor

that he remembered as a part of her. “It's solitude that I'm tired to

death of--solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister,

not content with reading the prayers for the sick, called on me this

morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his

duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think

he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature

of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to

me--condoning it, you know--and trying to patch up my peace with my

conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my

talent.”

Everett laughed. “Oh! I'm afraid I'm not the person to call after such

a serious gentleman--I can't sustain the situation. At my best I don't

reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble

uses you will devote yourself?”

Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed:

“I'm not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn't study

that method.”

She laughed and went on nervously: “The parson's not so bad. His English

never offends me, and he has read Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, all five

volumes, and that's something. Then, he has been to New York, and that's

a great deal. But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York;

Charley says you're just on from there. How does it look and taste and

smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons

of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what

does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or

have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden

Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes

of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided

aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall?

What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink

there in the world nowadays? You see, I'm homesick for it all, from the

Battery to Riverside. Oh, let me die in Harlem!” She was interrupted

by a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her

discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met

in town during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter. He was

diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he found in

his pocket, some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in

the production of the _Rheingold_, when he became conscious that she was

looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.

Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through

half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his

explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back in his pocket. As

he did so she said, quietly: “How wonderfully like Adriance you are!”

and he felt as though a crisis of some sort had been met and tided over.

He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that

made them seem quite boyish. “Yes, isn't it absurd? It's almost as

awkward as looking like Napoleon--but, after all, there are some

advantages. It has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will

make you.”

Katharine smiled and gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her

lashes. “Oh, it did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you

were then, and how you used to stare at people and then blush and look

cross if they paid you back in your own coin. Do you remember that night

when you took me home from a rehearsal and scarcely spoke a word to me?”

“It was the silence of admiration,” protested Everett, “very crude and

boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful. Perhaps you suspected

something of the sort? I remember you saw fit to be very grown-up and

worldly.

“I believe I suspected a pose; the one that college boys usually affect

with singers--'an earthen vessel in love with a star,' you know. But it

rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your

brother's pupils. Or had you an omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that

always met the occasion?”

“Don't ask a man to confess the follies of his youth,” said Everett,

smiling a little sadly; “I am sensitive about some of them even now. But

I was not so sophisticated as you imagined. I saw my brother's pupils

come and go, but that was about all. Sometimes I was called on to play

accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a

carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they

never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you

speak of.”

“Yes”, observed Katharine, thoughtfully, “I noticed it then, too; but it

has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have

lived such different lives. It's not merely an ordinary family likeness

of feature, you know, but a sort of interchangeable individuality;

the suggestion of the other man's personality in your face like an air

transposed to another key. But I'm not attempting to define it; it's

beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle--well, uncanny,”

she finished, laughing.

“I remember,” Everett said seriously, twirling the pencil between his

fingers and looking, as he sat with his head thrown back, out under the

red window blind which was raised just a little, and as it swung back

and forth in the wind revealed the glaring panorama of the desert--a

blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here

and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged-blue outline

of the mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds--“I

remember, when I was a little fellow I used to be very sensitive about

it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that I would have had it

otherwise if I could, but it seemed to me like a birthmark, or something

not to be lightly spoken of. People were naturally always fonder of

Ad than of me, and I used to feel the chill of reflected light pretty

often. It came into even my relations with my mother. Ad went abroad to

study when he was absurdly young, you know, and mother was all broken

up over it. She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was sort of

generally understood among us that she'd have made burnt offerings of us

all for Ad any day. I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone

on the porch in the summer dusk she used sometimes to call me to her and

turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and

kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance.”

“Poor little chap,” said Katharine, and her tone was a trifle huskier

than usual. “How fond people have always been of Adriance! Now tell me

the latest news of him. I haven't heard, except through the press, for

a year or more. He was in Algeria then, in the valley of the Chelif,

riding horseback night and day in an Arabian costume, and in his

usual enthusiastic fashion he had quite made up his mind to adopt the

Mohammedan faith and become as nearly an Arab as possible. How many

countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder? Probably he was playing

Arab to himself all the time. I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke

in Florence once for weeks together.”

“Oh, that's Adriance,” chuckled Everett. “He is himself barely long

enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn't hear

from him while he was an Arab; I missed that.”

“He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it must be in

the publisher's hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his

letter, and have lost touch with him.”

Everett drew a letter from his pocket. “This came about a month ago.

It's chiefly about his new opera, which is to be brought out in London

next winter. Read it at your leisure.”

“I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure you will

come again. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever you like; but if

there is anything new in the world, in mercy let me hear it. For nine

months I have heard nothing but 'The Baggage Coach Ahead' and 'She Is My

Baby's Mother.'”

He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his

remarkable physical likeness to his brother and trying to discover in

just what it consisted. She told herself that it was very much as though

a sculptor's finished work had been rudely copied in wood. He was of

a larger build than Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy,

while those of his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was

of the same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by

continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April color,

but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's were always

points of highlight, and always meaning another thing than the thing

they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why this earnest man should

so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face that was as gay as his

was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though

his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so

mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words. A

contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and of her

affections, had once said to him that the shepherd boys who sang in the

Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde; and the

comparison had been appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred

to quote.

As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that

night, he was a victim to random recollections. His infatuation for

Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his

boyish love affairs, and had long disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was

painfully timid in everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt

had withdrawn him from the society of women. The fact that it was all so

done and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her

life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and loss. He

bethought himself of something he had read about “sitting by the hearth

and remembering the faces of women without desire,” and felt himself an

octogenarian.

He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his

brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he

had wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He

had sat there in the box while his brother and Katharine were called

back again and again after the last number, watching the roses go up

over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano,

brooding, in his sullen boy's heart, upon the pride those two felt in

each other's work--spurring each other to their best and beautifully

contending in song. The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering line

drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame set about

those splendid children of genius. He walked back to his hotel alone

and sat in his window staring out on Madison Square until long after

midnight, resolving to beat no more at doors that he could never enter

and realizing more keenly than ever before how far this glorious world

of beautiful creations lay from the paths of men like himself. He told

himself that he had in common with this woman only the baser uses of

life.

Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of

release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of

the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging

him to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his

business engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's

ponies, or fishing in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his

room writing letters or reading. In the afternoon he was usually at his

post of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions

about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the

compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played

the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a

stopgap all his life. He remembered going through a looking glass

labyrinth when he was a boy and trying gallery after gallery, only at

every turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was not

his own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west,

by land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's

business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining

current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his duty

had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his

brother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no

attempt to analyze the situation or to state it in exact terms; but

he felt Katharine Gaylord's need for him, and he accepted it as a

commission from his brother to help this woman to die. Day by day he

felt her demands on him grow more imperious, her need for him grow more

acute and positive; and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation

to her his own individuality played a smaller and smaller part. His

power to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with

his brother's life. He understood all that his physical resemblance

meant to her. He knew that she sat by him always watching for some

common trick of gesture, some familiar play of expression, some illusion

of light and shadow, in which he should seem wholly Adriance. He knew

that she lived upon this and that her disease fed upon it; that it sent

shudders of remembrance through her and that in the exhaustion which

followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet and

dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine garden,

and not of bitterness and death.

The question which most perplexed him was, “How much shall I know? How

much does she wish me to know?” A few days after his first meeting with

Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother to write her. He had merely

said that she was mortally ill; he could depend on Adriance to say the

right thing--that was a part of his gift. Adriance always said not

only the right thing, but the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His

phrases took the color of the moment and the then-present condition, so

that they never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He

always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion

of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing, the

opportune, graceful, exquisite thing--except, when he did very cruel

things--bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his,

just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful;

lavishing upon those near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich

nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were

no longer near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.

Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily

call at the gaily painted ranch house, he found Katharine laughing like

a schoolgirl. “Have you ever thought,” she said, as he entered the

music room, “how much these seances of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine

Nights,' except that I don't give you an opportunity to monopolize the

conversation as Heine did?” She held his hand longer than usual, as

she greeted him, and looked searchingly up into his face. “You are the

kindest man living; the kindest,” she added, softly.

Everett's gray face colored faintly as he drew his hand away, for

he felt that this time she was looking at him and not at a whimsical

caricature of his brother. “Why, what have I done now?” he asked,

lamely. “I can't remember having sent you any stale candy or champagne

since yesterday.”

She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a

book and held it out, smiling. “You got him to write it. Don't say you

didn't, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was

a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with

the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you

didn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata,

the most ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me

directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the letter;

I think you would better read it aloud to me.”

Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window seat in which she

reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter,

his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that

it was a long one--wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance,

who was tender with his valet and his stable boy, with his old gondolier

and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.

The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the

fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy, with the warm

fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running

water, as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago.

The sky was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful

Moorish arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had

sketched an outline of them on the margin of his notepaper. The

subtleties of Arabic decoration had cast an unholy spell over him,

and the brutal exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily

forgotten. The Alhambra itself had, from the first, seemed perfectly

familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court,

sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode into

Andalusia. The letter was full of confidences about his work, and

delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and comradeship, and

of her own work, still so warmly remembered and appreciatively discussed

everywhere he went.

As Everett folded the letter he felt that Adriance had divined the thing

needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was

consistently egotistical and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing,

yet it was just what she had wanted. A strong realization of his

brother's charm and intensity and power came over him; he felt the

breath of that whirlwind of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming

all in his path, and himself even more resolutely than he consumed

others. Then he looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay

before him. “Like him, isn't it?” she said, quietly.

“I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see him next you

can do that for me. I want you to tell him many things for me, yet they

can all be summed up in this: I want him to grow wholly into his best

and greatest self, even at the cost of the dear boyishness that is half

his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?”

“I know perfectly well what you mean,” answered Everett, thoughtfully.

“I have often felt so about him myself. And yet it's difficult to

prescribe for those fellows; so little makes, so little mars.”

Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with

feverish earnestness. “Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean;

his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they

take him at their own estimate. He can kindle marble, strike fire from

putty, but is it worth what it costs him?”

“Come, come,” expostulated Everett, alarmed at her excitement. “Where is

the new sonata? Let him speak for himself.”

He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was

indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the most

ambitious work he had done up to that time and marked the transition

from his purely lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett played

intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems

peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything

in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.

“How he has grown!” she cried. “What the three last years have done for

him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the

tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the soul. This is the

tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my

tragedy, as I lie here spent by the racecourse, listening to the feet of

the runners as they pass me. Ah, God! The swift feet of the runners!”

She turned her face away and covered it with her straining hands.

Everett crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. In all

the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an occasional

ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat. Her

courage had become a point of pride with him, and to see it going

sickened him.

“Don't do it,” he gasped. “I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel it

too much. We mustn't speak of that; it's too tragic and too vast.”

When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old,

brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not

shed. “No, I won't be so ungenerous; I will save that for the watches

of the night when I have no better company. Now you may mix me another

drink of some sort. Formerly, when it was not _if_ I should ever sing

Brunnhilde, but quite simply when I _should_ sing Brunnhilde, I was

always starving myself and thinking what I might drink and what I might

not. But broken music boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no

one cares whether they lose their figure. Run over that theme at the

beginning again. That, at least, is not new. It was running in his head

when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at

the dinner table. He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn

came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him, and he decided

to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch with the theme during

his illness. Do you remember those frightful days? All the people who

have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself! When

I got word from Florence that he had been ill I was in Nice filling

a concert engagement. His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I

reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had

taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the

library--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture

and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,

looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, you

know. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking jacket

lent no color to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill

he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the

last strokes to the score of his _Souvenirs d'Automne_. He was as I

most like to remember him: so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he

usually is, but just contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness

that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain poured

down in torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and

sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls of

that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me! There were

no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard

features of the bronze Dante, like the reflection of purgatorial flames,

and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated

the gloom at all, Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness

of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire

and suffer to make up one such life as his. Somehow the wind with all

its world-pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes,

and the wave came up in both of us at once--that awful, vague, universal

pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope--and we were

like two clinging together on a spar in midocean after the shipwreck of

everything. Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind

that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights,

announcing that Madam had returned, _'and in the book we read no more

that night.'_”

She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with the hard,

bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a

glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn like a mask through so

many years, had gradually changed even the lines of her face completely,

and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing

critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself. Everett dropped

his head upon his hand and sat looking at the rug. “How much you have

cared!” he said.

“Ah, yes, I cared,” she replied, closing her eyes with a long-drawn sigh

of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went on: “You can't imagine

what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is

to be able to tell it to someone. I used to want to shriek it out to the

world in the long nights when I could not sleep. It seemed to me that I

could not die with it. It demanded some sort of expression. And now that

you know, you would scarcely believe how much less sharp the anguish of

it is.”

Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. “I was not sure how

much you wanted me to know,” he said.

“Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your

face, when you came that day with Charley. I flatter myself that I have

been able to conceal it when I chose, though I suppose women always

think that. The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people

are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little

before we begin to discern. But I wanted you to know; you are so like

him that it is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now

that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his

compassion, for we none of us dare pity the dead. Since it was what my

life has chiefly meant, I should like him to know. On the whole I am not

ashamed of it. I have fought a good fight.”

“And has he never known at all?” asked Everett, in a thick voice.

“Oh! Never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomed

to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he

doesn't find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some

discourtesy and is miserable about it. He has a genuine fondness for

everyone who is not stupid or gloomy, or old or preternaturally ugly.

Granted youth and cheerfulness, and a moderate amount of wit and some

tact, and Adriance will always be glad to see you coming around the

corner. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries

and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic;

we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our turns. It was his

kindness that was hardest. I have pretty well used my life up at

standing punishment.”

“Don't; you'll make me hate him,” groaned Everett.

Katharine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. “It wasn't

in the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of

it. Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to

him, and I drank my doom greedily enough.”

Everett rose and stood hesitating. “I think I must go. You ought to be

quiet, and I don't think I can hear any more just now.”

She put out her hand and took his playfully. “You've put in three weeks

at this sort of thing, haven't you? Well, it may never be to your glory

in this world, perhaps, but it's been the mercy of heaven to me, and it

ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be.”

Everett knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: “I stayed because I wanted

to be with you, that's all. I have never cared about other women since I

met you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and

I could not leave you if I would.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. “No, no; don't

tell me that. I have seen enough of tragedy, God knows. Don't show me

any more just as the curtain is going down. No, no, it was only a boy's

fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it

for a moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. If some fancy of

that sort had been left over from boyhood, this would rid you of it,

and that were well. Now go, and you will come again tomorrow, as long as

there are tomorrows, will you not?” She took his hand with a smile that

lifted the mask from her soul, that was both courage and despair, and

full of infinite loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:

For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;

If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;

If not, why then, this parting was well made.

The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he

went out.

On the night of Adriance Hilgarde's opening concert in Paris Everett sat

by the bed in the ranch house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle

that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it

forever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left

already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious

animal life were left to do battle with death. She labored under a

delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the

Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work.

When she aroused from her stupor it was only to ask the porter to waken

her half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate with him about

the delays and the roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the

nurse were left alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a

couch outside the door. Everett sat looking at the sputtering night lamp

until it made his eyes ache. His head dropped forward on the foot of the

bed, and he sank into a heavy, distressful slumber. He was dreaming of

Adriance's concert in Paris, and of Adriance, the troubadour, smiling

and debonair, with his boyish face and the touch of silver gray in

his hair. He heard the applause and he saw the roses going up over the

footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, and the

petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the floor. Down

this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his

prima donna by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish eyes.

The nurse touched him on the shoulder; he started and awoke. She

screened the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake

and conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm

and began to fan her. She laid her hands lightly on his hair and looked

into his face with eyes that seemed never to have wept or doubted. “Ah,

dear Adriance, dear, dear,” she whispered.

Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of

art was over for Katharine.

Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the

westbound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had

nothing to say to each other. Everett's bags were piled on the truck,

and his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he

gazed again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord's

impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close,

had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the

wrench of farewell.

As the train pulled in Everett wrung Gaylord's hand among the crowd of

alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, en route

to the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast

during the stop. Everett heard an exclamation in a broad German dialect,

and a massive woman whose figure persistently escaped from her stays in

the most improbable places rushed up to him, her blond hair disordered

by the wind, and glowing with joyful surprise she caught his coat sleeve

with her tightly gloved hands.

“_Herr Gott_, Adriance, _lieber Freund_,” she cried, emotionally.

Everett quickly withdrew his arm and lifted his hat, blushing. “Pardon

me, madam, but I see that you have mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde.

I am his brother,” he said quietly, and turning from the crestfallen

singer, he hurried into the car.